Category Archives: personal

The Universe Laughs

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So here’s a little irony. On Wednesday which was, I note:

(1) The day before Bike To Work Day in California…

(2) The day after I replied to a commenter that the extra investment in getting a folding bike like mine was well worth it (over getting a cheaper model) since -among other reasons- cheaper models would be more likely to fall apart while mine will last a lifetime…

I set off at 1:10pm on my bike to head (via the bus) to my office at USC, photocopy the final I’d spent the morning refining, and arrive at class at 2:00pm to set the final. Everything went fine, as usual, and as I did one last turn after waiting at the lights to head into the home stretch to catch the bus…

…my bike suddenly lost power. The chain had not slipped or broken though… An examination revealed that the crank arm/lever had completely broken away from the wheel holding the teeth and the chain. To be fair, I put an awful lot of regular stress on it (see below), but isn’t that ironic?

I got off the bike and wheeled it briskly to the bus stop I was headed for, managed to [..] Click to continue reading this post →

Ferrous Thoughts

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I spent an awful lot of time as a child and teenager tinkering with various projects. I’d have lots of projects on at any one time, brewing in my head for a while, and making their way to notebooks and scraps of soldering iron, meter, …paper, then to elaborate drawings showing the technical details, and ultimately to some sort of realization in the real work, some percentage of the time. In the Summer time, I would probably have one Big Project and that would occupy my thoughts for a great deal of time, and would involve a lot of hiding away doing things. Lots of these projects would involve electronics (increasingly as time went by and I Learned more and my various part time jobs could support more) and there’d be lots of tinkering with all sorts of items, and a constant feature would be the soldering iron, one not so different from the one that you see to the right.

Well, one of the many things I liked about the Iron Man movie (yes, I was right there to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Final Thoughts

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Well, it was a full day. Since this morning I’ve been putting the last touches on a paper with my student, V. I’ve been working at my home office (something odd going on with my office computer) while he’s elsewhere but present via IM. We can chat, exchange equations, drafts, and so forth, so it is good medium. Then mid-morning, I had a moment of confusion for a while, and progress stopped while I sorted that out. Discussions with V and another student, T, via IM about this and some other matters ensued, and then I was back on track, inputting edits from a session yesterday of reading it with pen-at-the-ready in a bookstore, inputting edits from V, and then another printout and review to add more.

duvel, bike, etc

Every now and again, a check of email, a walk around and a pull of the odd weed in the garden, and then back to it. Somehow this went on until 3:00 – three hours […] Click to continue reading this post →

Good Company

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Brian May. Photo from: http://www.guitar-poll.com/BM.phpHey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day – looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

I’m Just Driver

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I should really start a new series of posts with the title “What Could Possibly Go Wrong…?” This story from yesterday would be a fitting entry…

Did you see Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” last year? It was excellent, and of course totally overlooked in the recent discussions about good films of last year. It was released and seen by most people way too early in the year. Hollywood’s memory is not very good at recalling anything that came out earlier than the Fall if it did not come with a huge bang of publicity and so forth (like the excellent Bourne Ultimatum). Well, just for a moment there, I was in an American version of the film. (Setting-wise I mean. The film is set in a gritty, realistic not-Four-Weddings-or-Bridget-Jones London.) I was in New Jersey yesterday just for the day. (I’ll tell you more about it later.) Here’s what happened.
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag (Again)

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(The title refers to this post.)

Ok, this is a post of (probably pointless) complaint about one of society’s conventions. I do that from time to time. So as I said in an earlier post, I lost my bag within which I carry around my personal day to day stuff. It is small and fits on my shoulder and carries lots of useful stuff that I don’t like to carry in my pockets. My handbag, if you will. I happily carry such a bag, and call it by that name quite often. Sometimes I jokingly say that I’m “secure enough in my sexuality to call it what it is”, and not have to lamely resort to inventing a new name for something that already exists in the world serving that exact function – but carried by women. I’d forgotten just how serious and non-joking this whole business actually is. I did not recall how much trouble I’d previously gone to when I tried to find such a bag that suits my needs (practical and aesthetic). It’s a real pain. Losing it now meant that I had to go through this all over again, and discovering that I’d not really finished the job that previous time. (And the alternative names are so stupid – “manbag”, “murse”, etc… Haven’t they noticed that “handbag” is already gender neutral?)

What is the problem? Simply put, there’s an unbelievable amount of phobia here (and it is here in the USA more than, say Europe) about guys carrying such bags. Utterly […] Click to continue reading this post →

Head in the Clouds

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clouds near amarilloThis was not the time to break my over a decade long run of not flying American Airlines. I pretty much only fly United when doing most travel, but I had no choice for this trip from LA to Amarillo, Texas. It was a quick hop there and back in about 36 hours to take part in a rather important event – Andrew Chamblin (a friend and colleague who, you may know, died tragically in 2006) was being inducted into the Hall of Fame of his old High School and so I went along to take part in the ceremony with his family and some of his friends, and address (briefly) the assembled student body (it was such an honour to be asked […] Click to continue reading this post →

Consider the Alternatives

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multiple parallel branes, often used as central idea of alternative universesTomorrow I’m shooting all day for a TV show that is going to focus on the idea of alternative universes (or parallel universes, if you prefer). Should be fun. The setting at least will be interesting (more on that later) and it ought to be interesting to see how the writer puts all the material together into a coherent narrative. Part of my job will be to try to emphasize that while parallel/alternative universes show up a lot in actual scientific discussions (and have done for a long time), we have not yet had anything like a good observational or experimental reason to believe in their existence anywhere other than in our imaginations. It’s vital to get this across (I hope they don’t just edit it out) because people are so willing to believe in many half-baked fanciful ideas – and this is one of them – and when they show up in a science documentary (this is (again) for the History Channel’s “The Universe” series, which has been very good) with actual scientists being quoted, one should be especially careful (as we were on the “Cosmic Holes” episode (with different filmmakers), which has proven to be rather popular, and is full of speculative ideas like travel using wormholes and time machines right alongside equally fantastic-sounding things, like black holes, which are in fact a scientific reality). The rest of my job will be to talk about some of the places where the idea shows up in modern thought, some of the reasons why, and some of the opportunities for solving various challenging problems (and maybe creating a host of others!!) can be afforded by such ideas.

All that aside, this reminds me of something else entirely – Do you ever have those days when you feel like you’ve accidentally stepped sideways into an alternative universe? I do. Recently, I had a huge dose of it. Sit back and I’ll tell you the story…[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Potato, Moon

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roast potato

There’s really nothing like a sweet potato roasted in the heart of a wood fire. A wood fire lit out under a clear big sky with a full moon. After a long day of hiking. A day of hiking in the desert on a super hot day of vivid blue, brown, and gold. Delicious flavours, textures and colours.

I spent most of last week on retreat in Death Valley. It was Spring break, and I was […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Musical Interlude

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Stephon Alexander with saxophone

Cosmologist Stephon Alexander, with saxophone.

A snapshot from last Friday night (a week ago). There was no organized meal from the conference that night, and so people were left to their own devices to explore the chilly embrace of Washington DC. With the group of people that I was with, music emerged after dinner. Here is cosmologist Stephon Alexander (some of you may know him from his blogging days as part of the Quantum Diaries project.) with his saxophone. He’s in the middle of explaining tritone substitutions to two young […] Click to continue reading this post →

Energized

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nicholas payton

Nicholas Payton came to town last Wednesday. For me, this means drop everything and go and hear him play. Two happy coincidences took place as well, contributing to making it a bit more special. The first was that my friend and colleague from UBC, Moshe Rozali (who sometimes comments here on the blog) was visiting to give a seminar that day. As I’ve been discovering (as a result of this blog more than anything else) we are very much in the same place when it comes to music, books and many things, and so it was just fantastic to be able to take him along. The second was that my friend of many years, cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski, got in touch just on the off-chance by email (I’d not seen him in many months) to ask if I knew if there was any good jazz coming to town! Marc and I have shared our love of Jazz for about 16 years now, going back to our days of meeting up in New York together at various Jazz clubs. So the three of us sat there and enjoyed the concert together. It was at the Jazz Bakery (to which you’ve possibly read me refer here before), and since I’ve not been there in a while, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve replaced the plastic picnic chairs with some more comfortable padded ones. Quite an improvement.

Payton was joined by four excellent musicians, who were just great too: Russell […] Click to continue reading this post →

DC Crossover

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I find myself in Washington DC for two and a half days, attending an interesting conference. It’s the annual meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists* (NSBP), and I’ve been invited to give a talk (which I gave a few hours ago, entitled “The Dynamics of Flavour in Gauge/Gravity duals”, with a focus on what we can learn about experiments and observations of strongly interacting nuclear systems using string theory. Post about that here). I’m here for more just the talk, however. I also want to talk – in the sense of converse. Basically, it is of interest to me to get a feeling for what’s going on with the issues of underrepresented minorities (in this case, people of African descent) in Physics. As you know, the numbers are vanishingly small, and as you also know from reading my writings, I am very interested in this issue, and of course, how to make it not an issue, by helping more people find their way into the field and have as much opportunity to do well as the next person.

    nsbp banquet nsbp banquet

(Scene from the opening banquet on Thursday night. The featured speaker (no, not on stage in photo) was 2006 Physics Nobel Laureate, John C. Mather. Click for larger.)

It has been years since I came to one of these, and I must say it is a real pleasure to be here. There seems to be a lot of contrast to how I remember things from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nick Halmagyi: Why I do Science

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Nick HalmagyiI’m pleased to introduce a guest blogger today. It’s Nick Halmagyi, who you might have seen comment here from time to time. Nick is a postdoctoral researcher in Theoretical Physics, currently at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. Before that, he was a graduate student in our High Energy Physics group at USC, which is where I met him. Nick wrote his reflections below for Seed, and he reproduces a version of it (with permission – see details below*) here. I hope you enjoy it.

-cvj

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Theoretical physics is a tough subject. Just one example of how hard things can get is when you ramp up the energy density of a system, the physics used to describe the system itself starts to change. At first it may be a small tweak in the parameters that appear in the equations (the electric charge for example), but then there can be large, abrupt transitions.

The biggest system we study is the universe, and immediately after the big bang all of its energy occupied a tiny region of space. Back then, the energy density was enormous, and as the universe grew over time it underwent several transitions before it became what we now observe.

I’m a theoretical physicist, in part, because I relish the challenge of studying the entire […] Click to continue reading this post →